pretended to cherish, and regret
that she could not sufficiently cherish, the finer elements of nature.
What was this ideal she had complained of losing? It was a broken mirror:
she could think of it in no other form.

Dr. Shrapnel's 'Ego-Ego' yelped and gave chase to her through the pure
beatitudes of her earlier days down to her present regrets. It hunted all
the saints in the calendar till their haloes top-sided on their heads-her
favourite St. Francis of Assisi excepted.

The doctor was called up from Bevisham next day, and pronounced her
bilious. He was humorous over Captain Beauchamp, who had gone to the
parents of the dead girl, and gathered the information that they were a
consumptive family, to vindicate Dr. Shrapnel. 'The very family to
require strong nourishment,' said the doctor.

Cecilia did not rest in her sick-room before, hunting through one book
and another, she had found arguments on the contrary side; a waste of
labour that heaped oppression on her chest, as with the world's weight.
Apparently one had only to be in Beauchamp's track to experience that.
She horrified her father by asking questions about consumption.
Homoeopathy, hydropathy,--the revolutionaries of medicine attracted her.
Blackburn Tuckham, a model for an elected lover who is not beloved,
promised to procure all sorts of treatises for her: no man could have
been so deferential to a diseased mind. Beyond calling her by her
Christian name, he did nothing to distress her with the broad aspect of
their new relations together. He and Mr. Austin departed from Mount
Laurels, leaving her to sink into an agreeable stupor, like one deposited
on a mudbank after buffeting the waves. She learnt that her father had
seen Captain Baskelett, and remembered, marvelling, how her personal
dread of an interview, that threatened to compromise her ideal of her
feminine and peculiar dignity, had assisted to precipitate her where she
now lay helpless, almost inanimate.

She was unaware of the passage of time save when her father spoke of a
marriage-day. It told her that she lived and was moving. The fear of
death is not stronger in us, nor the desire to put it off, than Cecilia's
shunning of such a day. The naming of it numbed her blood like a
snakebite. Yet she openly acknowledged her engagement; and, happily for
Tuckham, his visits, both in London and at Mount Laurels, were few and
short, and he inflicted no foretaste of her coming subjection to him to
a